Moving on up

 

It's been a year offstage, the lights weren't bright and there was no-one watching, so I took this opportunity to do something I've been contemplating for a while. In the last few years, several coaches and conductors have quietly whispered the same thing in my ear: "do you think you might be moving up?". It was true. Having babies, maturing past my twenties, growing in confidence - perhaps a combination of them all - I was sounding and feeling less and less like a lyric mezzo.

But how do you make a change that would involve turning down a year's worth of work?

Boom! Pandemic hits, and it was now or never. The enforced hiatus was an opportunity. I asked the renowned singing teacher Janice Chapman to hear me (we hadn't met before, though of course I'd worked with many of her students). She confirmed my suspicions, and at the end of summer 2020 I started on the road to spinto soprano.

Suddenly a chocolate box of delights opened before me. Now I could at last discover the joys of singing Puccini, Verdi, Wagner. The heroines are fully formed, flesh and blood, and pour out their hearts in soaring music that uses all of my abilities to their full.

I'm moving on up.

Belinda Williams, soprano